Hey, you kids! Pull up your pants and turn down that loud music! An old lawyer is here to condescendingly tell you how to stop with your popular, effective actions against climate change, and instead take up his unpopular niche solution that won’t at all solve global warming.
The fossil fuel divestment movement has gotten hundreds of colleges, communities, religious institutions and foundations to commit to selling off stocks, bonds or funds that invest in climate-disrupting fuels. But Boston Globe columnist Tom Keane is here to tell you divestment is stupid and all those kids are stupid too:
It’s easy to question the students’ tactics. For one, there’s a whiff of hypocrisy. The same students doubtless drive cars, ride the bus, and fly in airplanes, all powered by petrochemicals. Demanding divestment gives the illusion of clean hands without actually having to wash up. Of course, almost all of us who worry about climate change are hypocrites as well. Fossil fuels are ubiquitous and necessary. Yes, Al Gore would jet from country to country telling folks, basically, not to fly in jets. But how else could he get there?
If you go anywhere you’re killing the planet! But we have to go places to get anywhere! I have no idea what Keane’s point is here. College kids are ruining the planet by taking public transportation?
In any event, occupying presidents’ offices won’t do much to help the environment.
What did protesting ever solve, anyway?
What could? Conservation.
“Mookie Betts won’t win the World Series for the Red Sox. What could? A well-constructed 25-man roster and a deep farm system.” Is that really a fair standard for judging Betts’ effectiveness?
Clearly Keane doesn’t understand divestment and hasn’t asked anyone to explain it to him. What do you expect, a Boston Globe columnist to leave his office and talk to people who don’t agree with him?
To understand divestment, go read David Roberts at Vox:
Nobody thinks the divestment movement can hurt fossil fuel companies in any direct financial way, but that’s not what it seeks to do. Rather, it seeks to put mainstream institutions on record defining climate mitigation as a moral imperative, to create social consensus that inaction is not neutral — it is immoral.
Green technocrats have tried to sell Washington on solutions like cap & trade and carbon taxes using economic framings like green jobs, investment and risk management. They’ve lost to every time to polluters using their big money advantage to win the partisan political game. Divestment is an attempt to re-take the moral high ground – to change the game.
But folks like Keane act like all we need is an even wonkier more technocratic fix:
The obvious answer is to artificially raise the price of gas by imposing taxes.
It’s an old idea. Europe does it, which is why the price of gas there is upwards of $10 gallon (and why Europeans have smaller cars and drive less). It’s resisted in the United State by both the right and left: Higher taxes are seen as just more fuel for a bigger public sector and they also disproportionately hurt those of more modest means. There is a way around those problems however. Collect the taxes, but then rebate them back. People’s pocketbooks wouldn’t be any lighter, but they would still become much more frugal in their use of gasoline.
It’s a good solution — maybe the only solution. Rather than spending their time in sit-ins, it’s an idea college students might want to rally around.
Look, I’m all for increasing the gas tax – it would raise needed revenue while adding some pain to burning a fossil fuel. But the federal and Massachusetts gas tax combined are a pathetic 44 cents a gallon. Gas is at $2.58 now. Even if you doubled the tax, gas would still be about $3 a gallon. How would that reduce gas use? Gas at $4 a gallon barely made a dent in driving. The truth is that we still subsidize driving in a hundred other ways, from untolled highways to free or low-cost on-street parking to housing policies that encourage sprawl.
Raising the gas tax is an unpopular idea that won’t solve the problem, especially since it completely ignores the majority of carbon emissions that come from electricity, industrial, agricultural and other sources.
With the Baker administration pushing new & expanded fracked gas pipelines that will make global warming even worse, we need bigger-picture ideas that get to the urgency of ending our fossil fuel dependence entirely. That’s where divestment comes in.
Cross-posted from The Green Miles
is without a doubt the most tiresome genre of climate-change commentary.
“You’re not doing it right”? Well do it better then.
“He is also general counsel for SmartPower, a nonprofit that advocates for and promotes conservation and alternative energies,” according to his bio. That might have been worth some disclosure in the article.
The thing I’ve had to come to grips with is how big and complicated global-warming strategies must be. Mostly because of political and economic ramifications.
In this climate for anyone to smugly claim that such and such does not work or is aesthetically incorrect should think twice. The rejected idea might actually be critical.
SmartPower played a positive role by helping homeowners to take advantage of the tax credits and other incentives for which other people agitated and worked.
Lesson: Everybody’s got to pull what can, sometimes in ways you might not expect.
I’m not saying anything goes, but anyone working on this issue should be humble about what “works” and what is to be done.
PS The kids are alright, to say the least.
We need to completely re-think the relationship between government and agriculture and food production. Current government policy encourages large scale farming and high utilization of water, energy, and chemicals.
The net result is that some foods are produced cheaply and excessively and then those foods have to be incorporated into all our foods (corn, soy) A secondary problem is the health effect of this type of diet.
Scarce water resources are used in dry places to produce food and then transport it all over the country.
A lot of this is about subsidies and political power. We should be subsidizing greenhouses in the northeast, and clear the way for smaller scale meat production, etc. I’m sure there are numerous roadblocks.
This would be seriously complicated, but it’s all within our control and theoretically could be without economic costs. We would get:
Less energy consumption
Less groundwater consumption
Less transport on the highways and railroads
Reduced utilization of marginal areas, which then would be positive for habitat.
Better treatment of farm animals
More production of vegetables
More production of food locally.
The pie in the sky challenge is that as long as large low population agricultural states have the same Senate representation as all the others it’s tough to get past. Witness how the Ethanol craze went down, including banning import of Brazilian ethanol.
Whatever was done with small scale solar seems to be working (when panels start popping up in my neighborhood, I notice). How ever we can stimulate smaller scale agriculture (tax credits, maybe) we should do it.
I wholeheartedly agree. Glad Mike Capuano and other progressives are starting to vote against the routine farm bills-they are corporate giveaways whose appropriations rarely land in the hands of Old McDonald, but rather his more affluent corporate namesake.
As for the OP, I never get liberal hand wringing over activists tactics. We saw some of this during the Occupy movement as well. We saw it back in the day during the anti-war and Civil Rights movement. Insiders and outsiders both play a key role in advancing change.
There is actually some middle ground that is worth exploring.
What if:
Federal subsidies to agriculture were reduced?
Consumption of resources (including water) were more market based?
The food supply of the US (quality) was improved?
Not too much debate over those being positives, and you could probably throw in health improvements as well.
Our side is not a big fan of agri-business either, but they are yet another super-powerful interest in this country, and it’s hard to politically maneuver in many parts of the country without kow-towing to them.
Bush pandered to them in 2000 with a bunch of ethanol based pork, that along with the evangelical stances were more than enough to sink McCain there. Obama pandered as an IL Senator on that and ‘clean coal’ while also backing both as a presidential candidate. If Hillary really wants to run differently she should oppose them, Bernie is against them as well so it wouldn’t offer him a real opening.
And there are a lot of issues where conservatives and liberals agree. As Goldwater allegedly told McGovern ‘if either you or I had won the special interests that run this town would’ve shit themselves’, and I strongly think if we got special interest money out of politics we would see real solutions emerge on some of these common sense no brainer issues. It took an executive unafraid of another election to finally end the Cuban embargo, maybe Hillary, unafraid of losing a Democratic primary, can make some bold promises. Otherwise, Bernie has nothing to lose.
I just want to explicitly mark my enthusiastic agreement with these comments from you.
I have a good friend (a player in the animal rights space) who posts videos of how we treat factory animals. I can’t watch them anymore. Kick a dog and people will despise you. Torture a pig or cow (and I don’t mean slaughter) and somehow you’re a hero of America’s heartland.
Why do we subsidize sugar producers? Why are we producing corn syrup to beat the band? Why does wildlife habitat need to be turned into farmland? I could string 50 questions together like this that have no answers.
I don’t get it. I really don’t.
Aren’t there at least two bills in the MA legislature that address carbon taxes, one sponsored by Mike Barrett and another by Marc Pacheco?
According to an official from British Columbia who spoke about that Canadian province’s successful carbon tax system at MIT recently, about 42% of the world’s gross production now includes a price on carbon and, next year when China’s carbon trading systems are expanded, over 50% of all the world’s industrial and commercial production will include a carbon price. That price varies from country to country and all of the current carbon prices are way too low in my inexpert opinion but at least there’s some consideration of carbon costs now built into a significant proportion of global productive capacity.
As someone who attended both the recent MIT and Harvard debates on divestment, perhaps the only person who did, I can tell you that the arguments against divestment offered at those events were much weaker than expected. In fact, the debaters on the con side at both events were already halfway to admitting that divestment was a useful tool in leveraging industry. At Harvard, Rebecca Henderson was against fossil fuel divestment in general but fully supported divestment from coal.
I suggest that the “fossil fuel divestment debate” is not really a debate at all and any objections to it are simply a tactical retreat and holding action by those who are way too comfortable with the status quo.
I mentioned it here, and the text of the bill is here.
Both grumpy old guys like me who nevertheless understand the importance of a range of different strategies to address climate change. So, while it’s right to criticize Tom Keane for his lack of understanding of the student protests, his lack of understanding is not due to grumpiness or age. Taking a shot at Keane for his age is just as gratuitous as taking shots at the students for their “youth and inexperience,” as Ronald Reagan would say.
According to their respective Wikipedia articles Barrett is 66 and Pacheco is 62.
But those would’ve been even less appropriate 🙂
I think he’s just an orifice that we all have, and my characterization has nothing to do with his age. I suspect he was the same at 25 that he is today. He’s certainly been on my bozo-list since the first time I read one of his columns years and years ago.
By thinking it puts ‘unconventional’ liberals to be ‘edgy’ when the bulk of them are warmed over Rockefeller Republicans spouting Broderisms and platitudes. I can’t think of a single legitimate progressive on their regular columnist roster. Maybe Adrian Walker. That’s about it.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/california-drought-political-answers-water-117706.html?google_editors_picks=true